Reviews for Mary Moody Northen Theatre Performances
Review: Romeo and Juliet by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 23, 2018
In this Romeo and Juliet the young persons are the story, and they carry the story. Director Robert Tolaro uses his three older Equity actors wisely, leaving room for the hot-blooded, the love-struck and the lovelorn.
Every teen deserves to attend a good staging of Romeo and Juliet, and the production now at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre is just that. On opening night I happened to sit next to a young woman who was thrilled by the opportunity. Not a student at St. Edward's University either; she'd read the play in high school and had watched Zeffirelli's film over and over again, and she was rapt to see that …
Review: ANON(ymous) by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 13, 2017
There's a happy ending in this production for children, but it presents faint reassurance amid strong suggestions of murder, immigrant deaths by drowning, stifling and road accident, human trafficking, sexual coercion, and cannibalism via sausage grinding.
There's a curious two-dimensionality to Naomi Iizuki's Anon(ymous). It's billed as a modern take on The Odyssey, and the rough correspondences aren't too hard to make out: a central character who's washed up ashore when a ship goes down and an episodic structure in which he's rescued and held by a nymph, later encounters and defeats a cyclops, and receives occasional visitations from a goddess; there's even a woman forestalling a suitor by night …
Review: Rhinoceros by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2017
Blake Browning invests himself mightily in a protagonist who's neither distinguished nor particularly strong. The core moment of the play comes when Marc Pouhé as Jean, his irascible friend, struggles mightily against the lure of the rhinoceros and loses.
The concept of Eugène Ionescu's 1959 Rhinoceros is almost painfully simple. It is 1940 France. Bérenger, the protagonist, is a disaffected young man who can't quite figure out who he is or why he should be doing anything. As he appeals to his friend Jean, an adamant older man, the town is visited by a rhinoceros that comes tearing down the street and disappears. Bérenger isn't much affected, but then another rhinoceros streaks through town. Or …
Review: Mouthful by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on November 15, 2016
An evening of ideologically flavored dishes of varied quality and appeal, MOUTHFUL has one deftly captivating piece by Clare Bayley and one appalling rant by Neil LaBute
The collection of six short plays packaged as Mouthful and presented by the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at St. Edward's University in Austin is an odd assortment. Loosely themed to concerns about nutrition and the world food supply, this evening is more a potluck than a smörgåsbord. A potluck meal usually unites the like-minded around a meal that's anything but predetermined, often with dishes of varied quality and appeal, while the classic Scandinavian smörgåsbord presents an …
Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on October 05, 2016
Deprived of Brecht's framework of satirical references to the rise of Adolf Hitler, the plot of this production sways awkwardly with no real point of attachment to our current political drama.
David Long's annual choices for directing at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre usually show a clever quirkiness and the ability to make surprising juxtapositions. He has a string of successes. He takes a classic and gives it modern comic spin (Molière's The Imaginary Invalid and Tartuffe) or he chooses a modern text that tips into absurdist fantasy (Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 and Love & Information, Overmeyer's On The Verge or The Geography of Longing, Chuck …
Review: She Loves Me by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Published on April 12, 2016
Confident romantic leads Cheyenne Barton and Matt Buzonas, comic Maureen Fenninger with her hungry heart of gold and other undergrads have plenty of stage time and fine musical opportunities.
There's a sweetness to She Loves Me, compounded of shop dust, wistfulness and perfume. Miklós László wrote this romantic comedy in 1937, shortly before abandoning his native Budapest for America. His gently humorous character-based tale about shop clerks seeking romance lent itself nicely to the 1941 MGM film The Little Shop Around the Corner with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, recycled in 1949 for the Judy Garland and Van Johnson musical In The Good Old Summertime. This …